Nina Chanel Abney emerged in 2008 when her work was included in the notable exhibition 30 Americans, organized by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. As one of the youngest among a distinguished group of intergenerational African American artists, she immediately became part of an important artistic lineage. Abney’s works are lively menageries populated by characters who are violent villains, unwitting victims, aspirational heroes and ineffectual anti-heroes, set against the backdrop of narratives that touch on politics, race, homophobia, celebrity, consumerism and other potentially incendiary topics. She comes from a generation raised on screens, in which multitasking and processing multiple streams of information simultaneously is the norm, and thus loads her works full of visual data. Densely packed with colorful figures, shapes, numbers and words, these paintings can be challenging to decipher and evince a sense of information overload. The artist has described her work as “easy to swallow, hard to digest,” and certainly its playful and seductive nature belies its often serious tone.
Several of Abney’s early paintings directly confront interracial violence and now seem like eerily prescient harbingers in the wake of the recent deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement in cities across the country. The titles and the imagery of these, along with more recent works that take on similar subjects, pose larger philosophical questions about the dynamics of power and responsibility, the ethics, agency and inherent bias of policing, methods of interrogation, and the politics of discriminatory practices. Often based on real events and filled with metaphor and allegory, Abney’s works take us on occasionally uncomfortable existential investigations of our own imperfect humanity.
Coinciding with her visits, The Nasher Museum will present Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, the first solo exhibition in a museum for Abney, a 34-year-old artist from Chicago who has been celebrated for her work’s candid commentary on today’s world. The traveling exhibition is a 10-year survey of approximately 30 of the artist’s paintings and collages. Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush is organized by Marshall N. Price, Nancy Hanks Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum.